Government Spies

In Spy Watching, Loch K. Johnson explores the United States' travails in its efforts to maintain effective accountability over its spy services.

Cambridge spy Guy Burgess was a supreme networker. He also set a gold standard for conflicts of interest, working variously for the BBC, MI5, MI6, the War Office, the Ministry of Information and the KGB. Yet Burgess was never challenged by Britain's spy catchers: his superiors were convinced he was too much of a liability to have been recruited by Moscow. Now, with a major new release of hundreds of files into the National Archives, Purvis and Hulbert reveal just how this charming establishment insider was able to fool everyone for so long.

The powerful story of a CIA whistleblower and political prisoner who refused to give up on his American dream. In 2015, Jeffrey Sterling was sentenced to prison, convicted of violating the Espionage Act. Sterling, it is now clear, was another victim of our government's draconian crackdown on alleged leakers and whistleblowers.

From 1941 to 1944, Bignor Manor, a farmhouse in Sussex, provided board and lodging for men and women of the French Resistance before they were flown by moonlight into occupied France. Barbara Bertram, whose husband was a conducting officer for the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), became hostess for these daring agents and their pilots during their brief stopovers in their house.

After the fall of France in the mid-1940s, Adolf Hitler faced a British Empire that refused to negotiate for peace. With total war looming, he ordered the Abwehr, Germany's defense and intelligence organization, to carry out Operation Lena - a program to place information-gathering spies within Britain. Quickly, a network of secret agents spread within the United Kingdom and across the British Empire. The stunning truth, though, was that every last one of these German spies had been captured and turned by the British.

When Imran Awan, an IT aide for Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), was arrested by the FBI as he tried to fly away to Pakistan, the media didn’t know what to make of the story. Was this just a bank fraud case or something more? Why was this team of congressional IT administrators paid chief-of-staff-level salaries? Why did they provide fraudulent data to Capitol Police? How had they evaded background checks?

The president of the United States has terminal cancer. Chief of Staff Eli James, his faithful consigliere and best friend, is one of the few who know. But just as the president’s condition mysteriously improves, Eli’s hit with another blow: his daughter has cancer too. Hell-bent on helping her, Eli turns to Big Pharma’s top lobbyist for advice, but their encounter yields more questions than answers. As he races along a twisted trail to the truth, he stumbles upon a devastating cover-up worth billions of dollars—and millions of lives.

Only in 1995 did the United States government officially reveal the existence of the super-secret Venona Project. For nearly fifty years American intelligence agents had been decoding thousands of Soviet messages, uncovering an enormous range of espionage activities carried out against the United States during World War II by its own allies. This extraordinary book is the first to examine the Venona messages.

Kristie Macrakis combines a storyteller's sense of drama with a historian's respect for evidence in this pause-resisting history of intrigue and espionage, love and war, magic and secrecy. From the piazzas of ancient Rome to the spy capitals of the Cold War, Macrakis' global history reveals the drama and importance of invisible ink. From Ovid's advice to use milk for illicit love notes, to al-Qaeda's hidden instructions in pornographic movies, this book presents stories of secret messaging that chart its evolution in sophistication and its impact on history.

In this thrilling first-hand psychological account of a spy's life, former intelligence boss Moe Shaik takes us behind the scenes of the '80s underground. Thanks to the crisis of conscience of a young Special Branch officer, dubbed the Nightingale, both the State’s and ANC operative’s secrets are laid bare.

In 1971, Rod Barton applied for a junior scientist role in the Australian Department of Defence. Little did he know what it entailed: As the Cold War intensified, Barton was inducted into the murky world of espionage. This is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes account of a world marked by risk, secrecy and individual acts of courage. The Life of a Spy will introduce you to a man of principle in a time of chaos, and take you to the frontlines of politics and war.

A unique investigation of the most important cases of the twentieth century, this exploration of the world's most glamorous and dangerous job - including information newly released under the Freedom of Information Act - will keep you enthralled until the last page. Neil Root's insightful book focuses on the personalities of many enigmatic figures, discusses their motivations and influences, and asks whether they were heroes, traitors or just scapegoats.

Why did the US intelligence services fail so spectacularly to know about the Soviet Union's nuclear capabilities following World War II? As Vince Houghton, historian and curator of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC, shows us, that disastrous failure came just a few years after the Manhattan Project's intelligence team had penetrated the Third Reich and knew every detail of the Nazi's plan for an atomic bomb. What changed and what went wrong?

"A revealing look into the intrigue and extraordinary courage of our intelligence gatherers of World War II. A rare combination of suspense thriller and true heroism by a great American writer." (Clive Cussler, New York Times best-selling author)

Han colaborado con los cárteles y con el gobierno, han derrumbado y encumbrado capos, han alimentado y dinamitado la «guerra contra el narco»; son infiltrados, protegidos, impunes y han jugado el juego más peligroso de todos... Son los «espías antinarcóticos» de Estados Unidos y este libro narra su historia.

Her father was a man cloaked in mystery, a man of contradiction. James M. Eichelberger was a writer, philosopher, decorated WWII intelligence officer, CIA Agent, and oil industry consultant who died a penniless alcoholic. After he left her family in Beirut, Lebanon when she was six years old, Anne E. Tazewell only saw her father seven times before his death in 1989.

Nocturno de la Democracia Mexicana son tres libros en uno. Un análisis ágil y novedoso sobre los lastres que nos impone la historia; una puntual recapitulación de nuestra aún inacabada transición a la democracia, y una advertencia sobre las pulsiones autoritarias del nuevo gobierno.

During the Cold War, stories of espionage became popular on both sides of the Iron Curtain, capturing the imagination of readers and filmgoers alike as secret police quietly engaged in surveillance under the shroud of impenetrable secrecy. And curiously, in the post-Cold War period there are no signs of this enthusiasm diminishing.

London. December 1981. The IRA is on the attack, a cold war is being waged, another war is just over the horizon, and Stephen Donaldson spends his days listening. When he first joined the Institute, he expected to encounter glamorous, high-risk espionage. Instead he gets the tape-recorded conversations of ancient Communists and ineffectual revolutionaries - until the day he is assigned a new case: the ultra-secret PHOENIX, a suspected internal leak.

In the mid-1970s, the CIA and KGB were both watching Karel Koecher closely—and they were both convinced he was working for the enemy. They were both right. Traveling with his wife, Hana, Koecher posed as a Czechoslovak asylum seeker and arrived in the US as a Communist sleeper agent. After parlaying a doctorate from Columbia into a job at the CIA, Koecher proceeded to operate as a double agent at the height of the Cold War.